Just read this on CrooksandLiars.com, one of the best political blogs out there if you’re a leftist radical like me. In any case, the Copyright Royalty Board is essentially moving forward with a plan to increase the royalty fees for playing music over the Web. All you folks out there who are for strict intellectual property protections and copyright, get ready to potentially lose your favorite Web radio programs. They’ll all be gone unless they are willing to pay through the nose in order to provide more money to the record companies (and remember, for all the pro-IP arguments out there, the reality is that the majority of the fees tend to go to the record companies, not the composers or performers).

What can be done? Probably not much, but signing a petition takes little time and effort so please go here and sign on. As C&L correctly point out, it will perhaps take a politician or two to take this on and reverse the momentum. But the more people who sign, the better—it can’t hurt.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 2:32 pm and is filed under Contemporary Classical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “if you like PostClassic Radio, Counterstream Radio, Contemporary-Classical.com, et al, sign this petition!”

Copyright and IP broke down big-time with the The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and this just breaks it even more. And virtually all of these restrictions are made to extend coporate/business’ revenue, not the artists’. A succinct description of this latest move is at the Broadcast Law Blog: